Sixty-five percent had a positive review, according to an instant CNN poll. But that comes with some major caveats.
showing 65 percent of viewers offered a positive review of Biden’s speech. Viewers also shifted 17 points toward believing the country is headed in the right direction — from 45 percent before the speech to 62 percent afterward.
The 65 percent who had a positive view of the speech was actually lower than any such speech CNN has polled in the past quarter-century — the previous low being Donald Trump’s 2018 address .And the 35 percent who offered a “very” positive review was effectively tied with Biden’s speech last year for the lowest on record. The next lowest were Biden’s 2022 speech and George W. Bush’s 2007 speech, which each earned “very” positive marks from 41 percent of viewers.
Now we get to the caveat, and that’s that viewers Thursday were less aligned with the president than your average State of the Union audience — potentially because we’re in a campaign year, or because questions about Biden’s ability to perform drew in more people who were skeptical of him.That appears to explain at least part of the poorer-than-normal reviews — but not all.
But we have seen such closely divided audiences and with stronger reviews. In Trump’s 2017 and 2018 speeches, Republicans outnumbered Democrats by just five percentage points in CNN’s sample. Trump’s reviews in those speeches were still stronger than Biden’s on Thursday: 78 percent positive in 2017, and 70 percent positive reviews in 2018.
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